Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

like "origins," "genealogy," and "sequentiality of events" once again, though in
a new manner. An example of this new spirit may be the popularity and esteem of
Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose in the 1980s. I am not referring to the
historical setting and flavor provided by a scholarly concern with authenticity
but something more intrinsic to
― xiii ―
the novel: its plot. After all, had William of Baskerville, the detective-monk,
inquired into the succession of head librarians in the abbey, had he pursued, as
a traditional historian would have, the succession of events related to the
library in chronological order, he would have discovered much sooner that Jorge
of Burgos should have been the prime suspect.[3]
This trend is accompanied by a renewed interest in narrative sources, which were
once seen as inferior to quantifiable records. Turning the tables around,
historians now indulge in the application of literary criticism or
narratological analysis to archival documents, to even such dry cases as census
registers, which have been seen as hardly more than data banks in previous
history-writing.[4]
It is not merely in the context of developments in world historiography that we
should situate trends in Ottoman studies. For one thing, the two are hardly ever
synchronized, since Ottomanists are often in the role of belated followers
rather than innovators or immediate participants. Besides, history-writing, like
any other kind of writing, needs to be viewed through its entanglements in the
sociocultural and ideological context of its time and stands at a particular
moment of an evolved intellectual/scholarly tradition. As the late classicist
Sir Moses Finley has demonstrated in his Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology,
the temporal distance of the period under investigation does not necessarily
provide it with immunity against the influence of present-day concerns.[5]
In Ottoman and Turkish studies, too, it is certainly true that the intensity of
the ideological dimension in historical investigation does not diminish as one
moves back in time. In fact, the period of Turkish migrations into and invasions
of Anatolia and the eventual establishment of Ottoman power over what had been
the Byzantine Empire must be one of the most ideologically laden, for reasons I
hope will become apparent to the readers of this book. It may be due partly to
such an awareness that lately more studies are published on the historiography
of that formative period (pre- and early Ottoman) than straight histories. In
fact the ongoing assessment of the gaza thesis can be seen as part of the same
historiographic stocktaking.[6]
This book itself is partly an extended historiographic essay on the rise of the
Ottoman state and on the treatment of this theme in historical scholarship. It
is also an attempt to develop, through this dialogue with Ottomanist
scholarship, a new appraisal of the medieval Anatolian frontier setting, with
its peculiar social and cultural dynamics, which enabled the emergence of
Ottoman power and thus played a major role in shap-
3